Major spoilers for Below follow.
Netflix’s Below arrives dressed as a creature feature: a remote Newfoundland fishing town, an enormous iceberg, unexplained illness, and something terrifying moving beneath the harbor. But the series’ most unsettling idea is not that a monster might be living in the ocean. It is that the conditions threatening the creature—and the people who live beside it—are being changed by a warming world.
The six-episode limited series follows Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) as his community faces a mysterious sea creature, a looming corporate buyout, and strange symptoms linked to the harbor. Marine researcher Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) helps investigate what is happening. The story gradually reframes the apparent monster problem as a wider crisis involving fragile ecosystems, economic pressure, and the fear that a familiar way of life may not survive.
That combination is why Below can feel more disturbing after the jump scares fade. The creature is fictional, but the anxiety surrounding changing oceans and vulnerable coastal livelihoods is not.
The climate reveal changes what the monster means
In the story, warming water threatens the survival of the creature’s eggs. The giant cephalopod, nicknamed Mudder, is not simply a predator stalking the town. As Fonda learns more about it, the creature’s behavior becomes easier to understand as an attempt to protect its offspring in an environment that is no longer suitable for them.
That shift complicates the usual horror setup. At first, the townspeople see an unknown animal as the danger. Later, the series asks viewers to consider whether the creature is also responding to a crisis humans helped create. Mudder remains frightening, but she is no longer a simple symbol of evil. Her desperation gives the story a tragic edge.
The ecological premise is not a claim that a real giant squid would behave exactly like Mudder. Netflix’s interview with marine biologist Dr. Annie Mercier separates the series’ fiction from actual cephalopod biology. Mercier explains that real cephalopods are elusive deep-sea animals and that changing ocean temperature and chemistry can affect marine life. The show takes those real pressures and builds a supernatural story around them.
Why warming oceans make the story feel plausible
Ocean warming is not just about hotter days at the beach. Temperature affects where marine species can live, how ecosystems function, and how fisheries support coastal communities. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries service notes that warming oceans, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification have significant consequences for marine life, ecosystems, and economies that depend on them.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ocean and cryosphere assessment also describes how warming, acidification, and declining oxygen can alter marine ecosystems. These changes do not affect every species in the same way, and real outcomes depend on location and biology. But the broad point is clear: ocean conditions are changing, and those changes can ripple through food webs and fishing communities.
Below turns that slow-moving ecological pressure into immediate drama. In real life, environmental change is often measured across years and decades; in a thriller, the consequences arrive in a single town, in the form of a mysterious illness, dangerous water, and an animal that appears to be acting unpredictably. The compressed timeline is a storytelling device, not a scientific forecast—but it gives an abstract problem a human scale.
Climate anxiety is also economic anxiety
One of the show’s sharper choices is to make the town’s future uncertain before the creature fully takes over the story. Calvin’s fishing livelihood is already precarious, and a powerful business interest wants residents to accept a buyout and leave. The environmental threat and the economic threat feed each other: when a community’s work, identity, and home are tied to the sea, changes in the marine environment can feel like a threat to the entire social fabric.
This is where Below moves beyond a simple “nature fights back” plot. Residents are not interchangeable victims waiting for a hero. They have family histories, loyalties, disagreements, and practical reasons to stay. Relocation might look like a clean solution to outsiders, but for people whose lives are rooted in a place, leaving can mean losing far more than a house.
Climate anxiety often includes this sense of lost control. People can understand that the climate is changing and still feel powerless when decisions about land, jobs, housing, and resources are made far from their community. The show’s corporate conflict makes that unease concrete: the townspeople are not only frightened by what is in the water, but also by who might profit from their displacement.
The ending leaves fear beneath the surface
By the finale, the creature’s fate gives the climate theme its most painful expression. Mudder’s young cannot survive the warmer conditions, and the adult creature dies after spawning. The story does not present this as a neat victory over a monster. It is a loss, even as Calvin and the town make it through their immediate crisis.
The final image of more icebergs on the horizon keeps that loss from feeling safely finished. The characters have dealt with one emergency, but the conditions that made the emergency possible have not disappeared. That is a familiar structure for climate anxiety: a crisis may pass, yet the underlying risk remains, and the next warning sign may already be visible in the distance.
That ending also resists an easy promise that one clever plan can solve a planetary problem. Calvin can act locally: protect his family, help the creature, and stand up for his neighbors. He cannot single-handedly stop ocean warming. The gap between what individuals can do and the scale of the threat is part of the unease the series leaves behind.
Watch the official Below trailer
The trailer sells the series as a coastal creature thriller, but its images of ice, fishing boats, and a community under pressure also point toward the environmental story beneath the scares.
Is Below really about climate change?
Climate change is an important part of the series’ story, especially through the warmer water threatening Mudder’s offspring and the wider vulnerability of the fishing community. But Below is also a family drama, a supernatural mystery, and a story about corporate power and belonging. It uses climate pressure as one strand of a larger narrative rather than turning every episode into a lecture.
Does the show accurately portray the science?
Not literally in every detail. Mudder and the events around her are fictional horror elements. The broader science—that ocean warming and changing chemistry can affect marine species and ecosystems—is supported by NOAA and IPCC research. The show’s creature-specific behavior should be understood as dramatic fiction informed by real biology, not a documentary account.
Why does the climate theme make the horror more effective?
Because the danger is not entirely external. The series suggests that the creature, the town’s fragile economy, and the people’s uncertain future are connected to environmental change. A monster can be defeated in a conventional story; a warming ocean and the social pressures around it are harder to escape.
The bottom line: Below is scariest when it stops treating the ocean as a mysterious backdrop and makes it part of the community’s future. Its giant squid may be fictional, but the fear of losing a home, a livelihood, and a familiar environment is recognizably human. The horror does not end when the creature disappears. It remains in the water—and in the uncertainty waiting beyond the final iceberg.
Sources and further reading
- Netflix Tudum: Could the Sea Creature in Below Really Exist?
- Netflix Tudum: Below ending explained
- NOAA Fisheries: Climate Change
- IPCC: Changing Ocean, Marine Ecosystems, and Dependent Communities
- PEOPLE: Below ending explained
- TheWrap: Below review
By Shivam Das
